"Have Mercy," but not towards your enemies!

We've noted various examples of the obfuscation and rationalization that has followed upon the defamation and unprofessional treatment of Prof. Tuvel, and here yet is another one, from philosopher Amy Olberding (Oklahoma) who blogs (not secretly) under the comically inapt pseudonym "Prof Manners" at the Feminist Philosophers blog. Although she never managed to denounce the defamation of Prof. Tuvel or the unprofessional conduct of the editors of Hypatia, she did see fit to declare "Have Mercy" with respect to this post of mine (which she did not link to!). I will quote just two readers who wrote to me about this display, though I won't name them, lest they become victims of Prof. Olberding's selective conception of "manners."

The first reader sent along a quote from one of the metablogs (unmoderated anonymous internet forums where those afraid of Prof. Olberding and others congregate and pontificate anonymously--I won't link, since past experience shows that usually ends badly):

Surely there can be more than the comically simplistic presentation of two sides here. The tendency to present these complex systemic (systemic!!!) issues as bifurcating into nameable good guys and bad guys insults us all…. It is possible to feel great concern and humanity for all who have been affected by this. It is possible to see all of the issues raised here as incredibly vexed and radically difficult to address. It is possible not to want anyone involved to suffer more or to be held up to further opprobium.

Can any human being who claims even the rudiments of a moral sense read these words without finding their finer feelings driven headlong to the very brink of tears?

OK, enough. Pop quiz: Is this post

(a) the latest exemplar of a proud FP tradition of refusing steadfastly, in the face of howsoever great a temptation to rhetorical advantage and political point-scoring, to cast complex issues in simplistic, binary, ‘us-vs-them’ terms, instead rising above the fray and awarding their laurel-wreath of moral approbation to the vindicated party, as well as, unfailingly, the golden apple of sympathetic concern and cheerful moral solicitude to those deemed to have succumbed, as all of us from time to time must, to an honest error of moral accounting, without fear, favor, or — least of all — any taint of vulgar ideological allegiance?

or

(b) a squalid, opportunistic attempt to divert attention from a paralyzed inability to take what is obviously the only decent course on a matter of clear principle and very serious consequence for a vulnerable female philosopher of precisely the sort it is their avowed mission to fight for — the paralysis having been induced over a long period by ideological toxins they have never cultivated sufficient intellectual honesty to resist, and which have increasingly presented, as symptoms, precisely the polarizing groupthink and irresponsible smearing of perceived enemies they now shamelessly purport to denounce as ‘the comically simplistic presentation of two sides’?

‘Twas ever thus. So long as they are riding high on moral self-admiration, the world is starkly Manichean: show me a concern for due process, and I’ll show you a rape apologist! But once they realize, too late, that they have thrown in their lot with a crowd of grubby narcissists and charlatans who are now exacting their pound of flesh, extorting from them a renunciation of the only feminist principles that ever made them worth taking seriously in the first place…. Why, then, it’s just all so complicated, don’t you see? Those crude oppositions — just – unjust, free-speech – censorship, scholarship – power-politics — are inevitably far too blunt to serve as instruments adequate to the infinitely nuanced complexities of the new dispensation.

Another reader e-mailed me the following:

Olberding writes that, "I here issue no judgment of Tuvel’s work but ask that we all recognize this: Even if you judge Tuvel to have done all of the things that have been laid at her door, she would not be unique in any of them. The problems that have been attached to her, that she has come to singularly personify in all these debates, are ones that her own critics would, I think, freely acknowledge exist all over the discipline. Yet she has been uniquely singled out for public opprobrium." She conspicuously passes up an opportunity to deny that the criticisms of the work are justified. And her own criticism of the mob does not seem to be that scholarly shortcomings are no grounds for demanding retraction of a peer-reviewed article. She could have said that, but she doesn’t. Her objection seems to be to the singling out, as being arbitrary. It seems that she reserves a right to object in principle to a simultaneous call for the retraction of all articles that are actually harmful in the way that Tuvel’s is alleged to be, even as she brackets the question of whether Tuvel’s article itself is harmful.